Last month, President Donald Trump upset many in the British establishment by dismissing the capabilities of the Royal Navy’s flattops, describing them as “toys” and writing in a post on his Truth Social social media network that they “don’t work.”Trump’s commentary is, of course, his own opinion. The fact is that both carriers have had reliability issues that the Royal Navy would like to move past, but calling them “toys” with no military value is an exaggeration.

The two Queen Elizabeth-class vessels are the first aircraft carriers operated by the Royal Navy since the decommissioning of HMS Ark Royal in 2011. This new class of warship is far more automated and advanced, and can deploy 36 of the new F-35B Lightning II Joint Strike Fighters.

The bigger issue may not be the warships’ capabilities, but the lack of funding to adequately support them.

The Royal Navy’s two Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers were approved in 2007 by then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown. HMS Prince of Wales was almost canceled and scrapped even before it set sail due to concerns over funding, yet it was determined that axing it would be more expensive than completing it.HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Queen Elizabeth cost a combined £7 billion ($9.4 billion), and it is widely accepted that the Royal Navy remains unable to adequately defend or operate them independently. The UK’s senior service has just one solid stores ship, RFA Fort Victoria, to support the carriers, and she is due to be retired in 2028.

Each of the 65,000-ton carriers requires a crew of 700, and the Royal Navy simply lacks the sailors to man them. It also lacks the escorts that would be necessary to protect the ships in the event of a conflict; it has no analogue to the enormous “carrier strike groups” that accompany the US Navy’s supercarriers everywhere they go.

As previously reported, the Royal Navy has more admirals than warships, and although both carriers took part in Indo-Pacific deployments in recent years, each relied on foreign naval support. That explains why neither HMS Queen Elizabeth nor HMS Prince of Wales was deployed to support the US Navy in its operations in the Middle East that confronted the Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen. The Royal Navy couldn’t have sent a carrier to aid the US in the war with Iran for similar reasons.

HMS Queen Elizabeth may have been an “awe-inspiring sight” as she left Rosyth, but it would be more inspiring if the warship could actually be combat-capable and reliable.

UKRAINE – In a forest somewhere between Kyiv and the front line, nine men are learning how to stay alive. They are literal graybeards; all of them look older than 40, if not 50. Under the watchful eyes of a mixed team of army instructors and civilian volunteers, the men execute a “drunk drill.” Rifles elevated skyward, they spin slowly in circles. When they are sufficiently dizzy and disoriented (in order to simulate head wounds), a sharp command drops them to the ground, where they each scramble to apply a tourniquet to one of their limbs.

This is one of dozens of tasks they will need to master to fight and survive on the deadly battlefields of the Donbas. Success at turning these civilians into soldiers is the hinge between victory and defeat in Ukraine.

A few hours east of the training camp, in Kharkiv, a brigade mobilization officer tells me about finding the raw material to feed the training camps and then the frontline forces. His unit, though one of the most elite in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, now relies on conscripted soldiers for 80 percent of its manpower. Recruited volunteers and transfers of men who have gone SZCH (the Ukrainian acronym for AWOL, absent without official leave) from other brigades account for the remainder. At least 20 percent of the entire Ukrainian military is estimated to be SZCH at any given time.
Absent true machine autonomy, drone tactics don’t remove the need for troops; they simply move manpower around.
Finding enough men to man the 1,200-kilometer front line is a ceaseless struggle for Ukraine. The country has more than ten million military-aged men but is struggling to keep an army of one million in the field. There is no meaningful reserve and no ability to give soldiers the clarity and hope of a fixed term of service. Ukraine’s soldiers are serving until death, severe wounds, or the war’s end. Many soldiers are exhausted after years of war without rest.

Deployments to the messy, mingled frontline “gray zone” are measured in months, not days. The manpower crisis exacerbates this grim situation. Fearing that their men will disappear into the ranks of the SZCH once they are out of the frontline kill zone, commanders are incentivized to keep them out even longer. Doing so heightens the danger to soldiers and their units: A new study by Ukraine’s military ombudsman found that after 40 days of frontline duty, soldiers become apathetic and ineffective. The commander in chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi, has just decreed that no soldier should serve more than 60 days straight in the front line. Whether Ukrainian units can adhere to this order is an open question